


Like Real People Do

by deathsteel



Series: One-Shots, Tumblr Prompts, and Unrelated Crap [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Castiel is a singer, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up Together, M/M, Slice of Life, The Winchesters are good parents, WTF ever make it work designers, assume all my fics have some cursing, like holy shit so sappy, old af b-day fic, sappy as shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28908954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathsteel/pseuds/deathsteel
Summary: What if Dean and Castiel grew up together and they were all human and there were no monsters and shit? IDK I retrieved this from my tumblr archives and I'm posting here to keep it all together.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Series: One-Shots, Tumblr Prompts, and Unrelated Crap [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/69894
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	Like Real People Do

“Mary, I don’t think anyone is coming,” John muttered to his wife where they stood in the living room doorway of their fourth new home in the last two years watching their eldest son, Dean, grow more and more despondent on the wide wooden staircase that led to the upstairs portion of the house.

He was waiting for the kids from his class at his new school to show up, kids that the fourth grader had only known for two weeks since enrolling in the new school when it started back after the winter break, but still kids that were his own age and not his little brother; kids that he had invited to his tenth birthday party with dinosaur emblazoned invitations that Dean had picked out specifically with his mother at the card and party store in town. Dean had taken off the party hat when the designated time for the festivities to start had come and gone with no one showing up, saying that he didn’t want to be the only one wearing one and just holding it patiently in his hand while Sam ran around the house in his own, had not; his long first grader limbs making him clumsy and the desire to cheer up his brother making him desperate in his hijinks as he struggled to make Dean laugh.

“Maybe they are just running late,” Mary whispered back, keeping her voice pitched low so that her son wouldn’t hear them doubting his new friends. “Or maybe their parents got lost; the house is a bit out of the way after all.”

Their old farmhouse was on the outskirts of town, away from all of the big gated communities and the suburbanized cookie cutter houses that John shied away from because they felt too impersonal and Mary hated because she thought they were bland and the backyards were tiny. Both of the elder Winchesters had grown up in Kansas, with yards that were flat and grassy; unfettered by fences and bleeding into the small groves of trees and creeks that they had played in as children. The closest neighbor was probably a half a mile away down the dirt road and the mother of that family had already shown up twice bearing bundt cake and talking to Mary over coffee about their respective children; it was the sort of neighborly interactions that John knew his wife both missed and craved now that they no long lived in so friendly you didn’t lock your doors Kansas.

“It’s not that far,” the older man groused, blaming himself for not being able to give Dean another thing that he wanted; his job may pay him more than enough to make moving all over the country worth his while, but he could buy Sam and Dean every toy they ever wanted and it still wouldn’t make him hate himself any less for depriving them of the little things that he couldn’t buy with a credit card or a wad of cash; things like friends that came to your birthday party. “Fucking stuck-up brats.”

“You’re the one that wanted to put them in private school,” Mary murmured, John could hear the unspoken ‘I told you so’ in his wife’s voice and he just rolled his eyes in response.

They had thought it would be better than public school, the boys were already both so far ahead of the standard curriculum thanks to Mary practically homeschooling them every time they were in the process of moving again and that one long year when they had lived in Canada with two toddlers that were too smart and too energetic for their own good. Dean had felt out of place reading at a high school level when he was only in the fourth grade and John had reasoned that there would be other kids at the magnet elementary school in their new town who could keep up with his sons, he just hadn’t counted on having to donate practically a whole new wing to the school in order to get both Sam and Dean in midway through the school year.

The fact that their family wasn’t part of the local country club and didn’t have a yacht and didn’t live in a part of town that had a gate surrounding it or a neighborhood watch committee was proving to be more of a barrier to their sons making friends than either parent had expected though. Mary had been concerned after her first encounter with the PTA at the elementary school, but it wasn’t until she had made friends with Mrs. Singer next door that she really started to think that maybe they had made the wrong choice by keeping their boys out of public school. Apparently there were classes here, ones for students that were “gifted” like Sam and Dean were and it helped their social skills to be around other kids who were on their level both emotionally and intellectually as well as economically.

“This sucks!” Dean announced, tossing his sweat dampened and wilted paper hat down onto the floor at the foot of the stairs and looking up at his mom with tears shining in his eyes. Sam froze where he was trying to do a handstand against the banister of the stairs, but the six year old did manage to stay upright for a couple of wobbly seconds before he tumbled over and looked up at his older brother with his own bottom lip trembling. “No one is coming! I told you, none of those kids like me! All of their dads are doctors or lawyers; they don’t even know what an environmental liaison is!”

John sighed and ran a tired hand over his face as his older son raced up the stairs to his bedroom, yelling about how all the stupid fish and all the stupid deer were ruining his life. Yea, Parent Day hadn’t really gone over very well at Dean’s last school; turns out most third graders just wanted to hear the firefighter moms and dads talk about rescuing people from burning buildings and not about how the President had commissioned him and his team to monitor toxicity levels in America’s surface waters.

He was just about to go after Dean when there was a knock on the door so John changed his direction and went to answer it instead. Mary was picking Sam up off the floor and soothing away the younger boy’s tears when he heard her surprised but elated response to the people who were standing on his doorstep, bundled up against the January cold and bearing several wrapped gifts and a large bundle of balloons.

“Karen!” his wife said, rushing up with the now curious looking Sam in her arms; John thought that he was way too big to still be carried around like that all the time. “You came! And these must be your boys, Castiel and Samandriel.”

“Yes,” the tired-eyed looking woman said with a smile, stomping the snow off her boots as she ushered her two small boys inside. “And Bobby is coming behind me with Jessica, he always has such trouble with the car seat. You’d think a mechanic would be able to figure out contraptions like that, but…well anyway. Boys, this is Mrs. Winchester, what do you say?”

The older boy, the one with the dark hair who was chubby and round faced in that way that John knew that he would probably eventually grow out of as soon as he hit his first growth spurt, looked up at him and his wife with blue eyes that were too serious and too old to belong to someone who was probably not much older than Dean. 

He stuck his small hand out, up and out to be exact toward John so that he could shake the dumbfounded older man’s hand. “Hello, sir, ma’am. My name is Castiel Jedidiah Singer.”

The other boy, who was younger and blonde and fragile looking even underneath the multiple layers of jackets and scarves and hats that he was wearing, waved sheepishly at the two unfamiliar adults. “I’m Samandriel.”

“My name’s Sam too!” John’s younger son shouted excitedly, right into Mary’s ear who winced as she quickly set him down on the floor so he could rush up to the new boy and hop up and down excitedly while his mom helped him extract himself from his layers. “Does your brother call you Sammy? Mine does, he’s a jerk.”

“Sam,” John admonished, glancing at Karen who was just smirking at his youngest son’s name calling. At least he hadn’t said an actual curse word, Mary was always getting onto him about watching his language around his two sons.

“Goddamnit!” A male voice cursed from somewhere outside in the driveway. “Darn carseat is going ta be the death of me. Karen! Some help here before me and your daughter freeze our balls off trying to get out of the car.”

“He’s used to boys,” Karen said with a shrug over what had to be her husband’s cursing about his ongoing battle with the car seat. “You should hear how he talks at home. Cassie’s first word was ‘idjit’. Did I say I was sorry for being late yet? I had to wait for Bobby to get home with the car, if it hadn’t snowed we would have walked and been here on time.”

“It always snows on my birthday.”

John glanced towards the stairs to see Dean looking warily down at the newcomers with his skinny arms crossed over his chest. His son looked like he had been crying because there were fresh tear streaks over his freckled cheeks, but Dean had always been a tough kid and he didn’t like for other people to see him cry. Mary thought it had something to do with him always getting teased at school for using words that the other kids thought he had made up when in reality he had just read them in books that the other fourth graders didn’t even know existed yet.

“Who the heck are you people?” Dean asked, narrowing his eyes at Castiel who had moved to pick up Dean’s abandoned party hat from the foot of the stairs after he had stripped himself out of the puffy tan coat he had been wearing. “I didn’t invite you to my party.”

“Dean!” Mary exclaimed, turning to apologize to Karen just as her husband bustled up the front steps red faced and cursing softly under his breath with a baby carrier containing a giggling toddler wrapped in a mountain of pink fabric. “You’re being rude. The Singers are here for your party because I invited them. Now get down here and say hello, I know I didn’t raise you to treat people like that.”

The ten year old rolled his eyes dramatically and John could almost see the teenager who was lurking just a couple of years away in the expression of his eldest son as he trudged down the stairs to stop at the one just above the older Singer boy. Dean stuck his hand out to Castiel, with much less grace than the other boy who had literally just made the same gesture towards John and Mary, and shook his hand in a wary, perfunctory sort of way.

Castiel frowned down at the hand that Dean had just shaken before looking up at the other boy and then back down at the misshapen party hat that was still in his other hand. John watched as the strange boy nodded to himself and then put the party hat on his own head, popping the elastic band under his chin with an air of finality like he was daring Dean to question that he was actually there for his birthday party again. The kid was kind of weird and kind of brave; John couldn’t decide which trait he liked better, but Bobby was smirking at the whole exchange like it was normal so he was leaning towards hoping that Castiel would stick around to put Dean in his place every now and then.

Dean smirked at the other boy and reached out to flick the party hat with his index finger like he did to Sam’s too big ears in the backseat of the car when he said his younger brother was being annoying. John let out a sigh of relief when his oldest son jumped down from the step he was on and took hold of Castiel’s hand with a brisk determination that was downright adorable on the newly double digited little boy’s face.

“You’ll do,” his oldest son said, dragging Castiel towards the living room and all of the party games that Mary had worked to set up early that morning with Sam being more of a hindrance than he was a help.

“I think you’re right, Karen,” Mary said knowingly to the other woman who had finally released Samandriel from his last layer to be dragged off by Sammy after both of their older brothers. “I think we’re going to be switching the boys to public school. “  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
On Castiel’s twenty fifth birthday, Karen watched her oldest son. He was smiling softly and happily, hand held just as firmly this time as it had been that first time by Dean as the other man told him all of the things that he had struggled to put down on paper for weeks leading up to the wedding.

She had been there for Dean’s eleventh birthday party when John got the call from his boss that they needed him and his team in Arizona to figure out something that was going on with an endangered species and an aquifer. Bobby had told her later that his new friend had politely told his boss where to shove it before he had offered John a job at his auto shop; having an engineer who knew his way around an Oldsmobile had done wonders for business.

She hadn’t been there for the fifteenth birthday party; when Mary had called her and told her all about how she had come downstairs after sleeping fitfully all night from the racket that the living room full of teenaged boys had been making to find that Dean and Castiel had zipped their sleeping bags together before going to sleep and apparently none of the other boys had had a problem with it. Well, there had been some Sharpie drawn mustaches on both her son’s as well as Dean’s faces, but Gabriel Novak and Balthazar Roche assured their friends’ moms that it had been done because the two boys were the first to fall asleep and not because of the sleeping bags. Apparently Karen and Mary had not been the only ones to notice what was going on with their sons.

For Dean’s eighteenth birthday, Castiel had found a signed, first edition copy of Slaughterhouse-five on eBay to give to his boyfriend for his birthday and Bobby had told his son that he could work off the cost of it by working in the garage over spring break. It pretty much ruined the surprise camping trip that Dean had been planning for him and Cas to take Samandriel on, well he insisted on being called Alfie now that he was fourteen and moody as hell, but John told him that it was the first time that he could remember seeing his son crying in front of him since Dean had been a kid. Bobby figured that Saman—shit. Alfie would understand the whole thing; he didn’t really like camping much at that age anyway.

Sam, as in Winchester, was the unfortunate one to witness exactly what his older brother got for his twenty-first birthday and he told Jess Singer (who he had just started dating after getting the blessing of both of her older brothers as well as Bobby) that he never wanted to see her in lingerie ever. Like….really. Ever.

No one was there on Dean’s twenty fourth birthday when Cas told him that he was ready when Dean was; a statement that meant nothing to no one but the other man, but still it was the best present that the eldest Winchester had ever gotten in his life.

So they decided not to wait and as clichéd as it all was, Cas’s birthday just happened to fall on Valentine’s Day. It couldn’t have worked out better, because Gabe had gotten drunk one weekend and decided that it would be a good idea to get certified as a priest online. Sure it was for some weirdo religion that Dean was pretty sure actually came out of a Star Trek episode, but what the hell ever. With less than a month to plan it and neither Dean or Cas making a lot of money as a writer or an EMT respectively, it still came together fairly well in the freshly driven snow that made up the backyard that had long ago stopped belonging to just the Winchesters or just the Singers.

It belonged to both of the families and it always would. Or at least Dean said something along those lines in his vows, getting a lot of nature references from his Dad who hadn’t worked on anything but cars for years. Dean had always gotten inspiration from nature so it seemed only fitting to ask his dad for something sentimental and heartfelt that he could say on the one and only occasion when he couldn’t think of the right words to describe how he felt about his neighbor turned boyfriend turned lover and soon to be husband.

Cas though, he knew what he wanted to say. Had known since that first time when had been chubby and awkward and drawn towards the boy who didn’t want anyone to see him cry. Dean had said it first, but Castiel knew that it would always be his favorite memory of their time together no matter what else might happen because it was perfect. Innocent and pure and unsuspecting of how much the phrase would actually come to mean to both him and Dean.

So when Gabe got all silly serious, putting on his most imperious voice and waggling his eyebrows at the few assembled people that they actually cared about sharing this with (family of course, some high school friends, and Crowley who had literally just turned up at his dad’s shop one day with an Audi and a dream and never fucking left) as he asked if Dean was the person who he wanted to have and to hold for better or for worse for the rest of his life, Castiel took his opportunity to see that smirk again. The one that was still the same almost fifteen years later that he had fallen in love with.

“You’ll do,” He said, smiling in spite of himself when Dean called him an idjit and pulled him in for a kiss. “I mean, I guess it’s too late to back out now.”

**Author's Note:**

> IDK I retrieved this from my tumblr archives and I'm posting here to keep it all together.


End file.
